Zillow and ERA partner on listings

In what could be the sign of Zillow.com’s future, the Seattle online real estate startup has inked a deal to receive thousands of for-sale listings from ERA Franchise Systems.

The deal calls for ERA — with 38,000 brokers — to feed as many as 80,000 property listings to Zillow each day. Those who browse the listings on Zillow will be linked back to the ERA.com Web site where they can find more information. ERA is a subsidiary of Realogy, a large real estate company that already provides listings to Trulia — a San Francisco competitor to Zillow.

After raising $30 million in venture funding last month, Zillow Chief Executive Rich Barton said that they planned to increase the number of for-sale listings on the site through partnerships with real estate companies.

“We have had lots of brokers coming and asking us if we could have a more automated way for the brokerages to put up lots of listings at a time and so we are working on a product that is a structured feed where a broker can feed us listings,” he said.

The ERA listings will start appearing on Zillow’s site later this year, following the launch of the feed system. Zillow currently has 237,804 homes for sale on the site posted individually by brokers.

UPDATE: It just occurred to me that Zillow will be pushing people off its site to ERA.com — a tough proposition for a media company that derives revenue by keeping home buyers and sellers engaged. I recently asked Trulia’s Pete Flint — whose company also pushes visitors to real estate listings on other sites — about Trulia’s value to advertisers since many Trulia users end up on other real estate Web sites. Here’s what he said:

“We are a much more attractive proposition to people like Windermere and John L. Scott then they are with Realtor.com or Zillow, because Zillow and Realtor.com’s model is to keep people on their site…”

And Flint continued comparing his company to Google, and Zillow to Yahoo:

“I think if you look at the evolution of the Internet and how it goes from a search model to a portal model or aggregation model, where you keep people on the site…. It is an easy comparison to look at Google versus Yahoo. Search versus portal. Search is an extremely attractive advertising proposition because it directs traffic to where the content is. It is actually much more monetizable to sell clicks than it is to sell page impressions, so I am pretty confident that the search model is far more profitable.”

So, with this agreement with ERA and others that I am sure will follow, what is Zillow’s goal? Does it want to keep people on the site or pass its users over to other real estate sites? Maybe a combination of both?